


Approaching Historical

by tritonvert



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, French Revolution, Gen, Les Mis Across History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonvert/pseuds/tritonvert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Enjolras' mother is the Republic, before Combeferre can prefer a Condorcet or a Robespierre, before de Courfeyrac drops his particle...in fact, before the taking of the Bastille. </p><p>(But not before the first partitioning of Poland.  And Grantaire still doesn't do personal boundaries very well.)</p><p> </p><p>For the #Les Mis Across History festival: actual French Revolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**I.  
**

**April 1789**

We are at war here in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.  We must be, or why would the Paris garrison be shooting guns at my front door?  _My_ front door, I say, speaking largely: my front door, the front door shared by the fat cabinet-maker and his fat wife on the first floor, the fat cabinet-maker’s less-fat maiden sister on the second floor, a succession of thinner and thinner non-entities as you go higher up.  Me, I have a room under the eaves, facing the courtyard, a view of trash and dirty sparrows.  Some nights when I can’t be bothered to aim at the chamberpot I just piss out the window.  Was Diogenes more dainty?

My front door, then, and the Paris garrison.  Because it seems there was a riot yesterday.  I found out about it when that hulking Bahorel tipped me out of my chair and kicked me awake.  (He says he didn’t kick me.  All I know is I woke up with his boots near my chin.)  “Grantaire, you great clod of earth, uproot yourself and help a friend.  I’ve been in a little scuffle, along with some of your neighbors.” 

(Parenthesis: I still don’t understand it all.  It’s about the wages.  They’re saying they’ll starve if Réveillon cuts wages at his factory.  Is he really planning on it?  And what good does it do if someone knocks old Réveillon on the head?  Why should I want that?  I sell him patterns from time to time—used to work for him regularly but I got sick of turning up every day.  I painted his wife once!  Anyway, fifteen sous or forty, they’re lucky to be in a job.  I said as much to my neighbor, but he just gave me one of those tight-lipped looks.  It turned out he’d been organizing gatherings about it all, trying to get a word with Réveillon for some kind of explanation.  Feuilly.  He’s a man you can’t argue with sober or you’d hate yourself too much.  He taught himself everything.  Reading, writing, drawing.  Languages.  He reads about America, he reads about England, he reads about Brabant.  Did _you_ know that Poland is having some meeting to write a constitution?  _Feuilly_ knew.  He’s a good fellow but I can’t talk to him sober.  How can you live with yourself when your neighbor is so terribly brilliant?  He finds time to be _good_ too, the devil.  You can’t even resent him.)

I said some of that to Bahorel’s foot before he got me sitting up on my bed.  That’s when I realized that the noises banging around outside weren’t thunder—and that the pattern on Bahorel’s waistcoat wasn’t its original embroidery.  I’d thought it was rosebuds but no, blood had spattered down all over his front.  From his nose.  “The hell have you been doing,” I asked, and he explained about this little riot.  And so here we are, we and the French Guard.  “Listen, Grantaire.  You stay in here, old thing, this side of the building’s safer than the street side.  They’re firing at us.  Might bring cannons.  Some of the lads and I want to get up on the roof.  For the tiles, right?  To throw down at the guard, see if they won't budge?  Can I reach it from your window?  Hey— _hey_ —Grantaire, _can I reach the roof from your window?_ “ 

I can hear horses, and some girl is shouting.  In a minute, a good long minute, I’ll splash some water on my face, wake up, scramble after Bahorel with a pad of paper to sketch on.  Maybe I’ll have something better than dirty pictures of our beloved Madame Deficit to sell. 

—

“ _You don’t believe it?_ ”

“I cannot.”

“Grantaire!  Grantaire, this man—this _scholar_ —can’t believe the French Guard fired on the houses.  On _your_ house.  You tell him.  —Grantaire will tell you.  He drew it.  You can buy his picture at any street corner.”  It’s nice advertisement but I wish he wouldn’t.  I’m busy.  I’m looking at lightning playing over a dark cloud.  Oh, I know, it’s just some man’s hair, the natural unpowdered pelt of some lawyer or law-student who’s so far ahead of fashion that he doesn’t wear a wig.  But looking at it through the muddy dregs at the bottom of this bottle, looking at the strands that have escaped their ribbon to spread over his good black coat, it’s like seeing a storm.

I start to direct them towards Feuilly instead—Bahorel and Feuilly are fast friends now, turns out that when the guard started firing on our neighbors Feuilly lit up like a spark and joined Bahorel in pitching down roof-tiles.  A pair of Joves, thundering down.  Now he’s out a job and lodgings.  As, by the way, am I.  But Bahorel’s not one to let you down.  He took us both in.  (Me, on the condition that I not piss out the window any more.  That’s civilization for you.)

So, right, I start to direct the argument to Feuilly, since he’s a man for earnest discourse, but Bahorel leans on me so hard that the words come out in a wheeze, and maybe he has a point.  Better not to draw attention to the sober printer-of-cabbage-roses-turned-rooftop-rioter, Hephaistos-turned-Zeus.  Ares?  Me, I’m just a drunk artist who hasn’t done anything more illegal than draw a scene hundreds of people saw with their own eyes. 

While I’m wheezing, Bahorel’s scholar speaks again.  This one does wear a wig, and he has little spectacles perched on top of it.  “I ask your pardon, sir—I should have said that I _could_ not believe it, not that I cannot now.  It is so far out of the natural order of things, Paris soldiers opening fire on Paris houses, that at first my mind rejected the story.”  There, you see?  We’re _all_ wild radicals here, or something like that.  More friends for Bahorel and Feuilly.  I go back to my study of electricity: my study of Spectacles’ friend.  He hasn’t turned his face to me yet.  Probably it will be a disappointment.  You’d have to look like an angel to match that hair, to match the voice I’ve been listening to this last quarter-hour, to match the stupid muddy metaphors I’ve put together.  Bahorel hadn’t heard them; Bahorel has been in a corner with his arm around a girl and just came back in time to pick a quarrel.  But I’ve been listening and it’s all political philosophy.  The rights of man.  I’ve always thought the rights of a man extended as far as starving under whatever hedgerow shelter he can defend from the wild dogs: but these two men—no, this one man—makes the social contract sound like more than words.  (Don’t get me wrong, Spectacles knows his stuff too.  But he’s not Prometheus come into this grubby café with the gods’ fire.)

And now I have to scrap _that_ metaphor because he’s turned his head for a moment, glancing in this direction—he can’t see me, I hope, my head is pillowed on my arm behind a wall of bottles—and no mere Titan is adequate for comparison.  Hermes, maybe?  The perfection of boyish youth, the winged words?  Or, no, perhaps—

“A glass with you, sir?”

“…Ganymede?”  No, I don’t think that works. But anyway, who's this interrupting ass?

“Well—it’s de Courfeyrac, to tell the truth.  But I take your address as a compliment.  And I’ll take this empty chair as a seat, and you’ll take this glass as a peace-offering.  It seems that your friends and my friends have found religion together.  By religion I mean politics, and by politics I mean only the purest and highest of ideals.  Which is a thing of beauty, but I can’t help noticing that my own empty seat has been converted into an altar, bearing up the exceptionally well-tailored frame of your large friend there, a friend so large—and so well-tailored—that I hesitate to mention his situation vis-à-vis my empty chair.   So I said to myself—Well, de Courfeyrac, here’s another empty chair, with a new friend next to it if you only make an effort.”

**May, 1789**

So I’ve made myself valuable lately.  I spent two days sober, powdered, and shaved, introducing Feuilly to my various printing associates.  Because you see, the poor devil is still out a job.  The name Réveillon isn’t a good reference.  Even before the riot he didn’t win friends in the guild system.  It seems his workers suffer for it.   We’ve been to eight or ten different shops, men who buy my scribblings to turn them out into the illustrations generally called “curious,” or else into political allegories as the case may be.  They’re happy to see me, happy to meet a skilled workman friend of mine—and then the Réveillon business comes up and they start looking at us from the sides of their eyes.  They cough, cover their faces: a bit dusty in here this morning, sorry.  Do they think he’s a rabid dog, going to leap at their throats?  Or is it the old feud between the wallpaper-men and the copperplate-men?  But someone’s wife’s widowed sister is struggling to keep up a little publishing business, might take on a craftsman who knows how to draw _and_ to engrave if he doesn’t mind short wages, not too short you understand but times are very hard and if he thinks he could make do… Et cetera. 

So that’s one use for me.  And now I’ve made myself valuable by knowing a woman who drives a little cart between Paris and Versailles every day.  Ducks.  She transports ducks.  Ducks and geese.  Why is this valuable?  Because, you see, everyone with any hint of a soul wants to see the procession tomorrow.  The opening of the Estates-General.  Necker—the name is on everyone’s lips like a prayer and in the last days I’ve learned to speak it too—Necker has advocated double representation for the Third Estate.  That’s us.  (Mostly: there’s one little fellow among my new best friends who’s supposed to be studying to be a priest.  An only son, and rich, turned priest?  There’s faith for you!  He writes devout poetry, like some medieval ecstatic, completely out of fashion.  But it seems he’s finding new beliefs.  The Third Estate may keep him yet.)

Yes, that’s us.  The Third Estate this evening, rattling along in a muddy cart, taking turns hopping down and walking because we don’t all fit. Those who know how, can ride: de Courfeyrac appeared on the scene with two horses for our journey.  (There’s a Hermes for you, by the way.)  He spun out a story about them prancing up to him in an alley, shaking fairy-dust from their manes.  By the time he was done we were all laughing too hard to mind that he has the money to rent horses.  So good old Lesgle is bumping along in the saddle like a country curé, and jolly Joly rides next to him, laughing at his jokes from behind an enormous handkerchief.  Combeferre is up front with the light glinting off his spectacles (still perched on his wig), chatting with our Auntie Goose.  It seems he knows how to drive this contraption; it also seems he has read about an improved treatment for waterfowl afflicted with—oh, some affliction of waterfowl, don’t ask me, but it’s something that carried away half our hostess’ flock last year.  I’m perched behind him on a stack of empty crates, ostensibly working on a series of sketches documenting our progress.  So far I’ve drawn Enjolras in five different lights.  Such beautiful marble.

The beautiful marble looks up.  I know he wants to say something to Combeferre, and here I am in the way, but Enjolras has a warm smile even for me today.  Perhaps I even _exist_ in his world today.  I might be someone.  “You know, Grantaire, I’m pleased you’ve brought your work with you.  We need every eye-witness tomorrow.   I believe it will be one of the greatest days in our history.”

**June 1789**

Up and up I move in the world, like a…thing that goes up.  Where’s our Eagle-of-words when you need him?  Bossuet—oh.  Hum.  He’s got Joly’s girl on his knee.  Does Joly know?  Oh, well, he must, as he’s standing next to them.  The left hand knows not what the right hand is doing, they say, but _they_ never met a left and a right hand like our Lesgle and Joly. 

Where was I?  Yes, going up and up in the world.  De Courfeyrac’s a gem, a pearl, a lovely round and glowing pearl—whose cousin or aunt or god-knows-what is thick as thieves with David and his dozens of students.  What’s that, old Grantaire, you’d like greater scope for your prodigious talent, your talent that would illuminate us all if we only lifted the bushel off of it?  Why, let me just have a word with a friend.  And here we all are, drinking to my first day as a student in a Real Studio.  He’s the man of the hour, three cheers for Grantaire, his face may look sour, but he’ll drink you under your chair. 

Up and up, shaking the mud off my shoes, right?  But here I am looking at my friends’ backs.  They’ve got a letter from Enjolras and Combeferre: a letter from Versailles.  All the latest news.  Something about the king and Mirabeau and Bailly.  Some great turn of events.  Another greatest-day-in-our-history.  I should pull myself to my feet and join them there.  Take my place in the glow of history.  Or the future, whichever it is—sometimes it's one, sometimes the other, to hear them talk.  Rome in one direction, Progress in another, and here in the present we’re reading about Mirabeau and Bailly and a crowd of black-coated deputies in the rain.  Haven’t I drawn a dozen Mirabeaus by now, Mirabeaus for sale?  And what a face to draw.  As bad as my own.  Believe me, I’m no Narcissus to drown in my reflection.  Did Narcissus drown?  Or did he merely waste away?  I don’t recall now. Give me a wine-barrel and _I’ll_ drown in it.

I’m on the floor now, and I don’t really remember the decline and the fall but it’s funny when you think about it, isn’t it?  I bellow bloated metaphors day in and day out but here I am on the floor because I can’t reach my enlightened friends there in the future and why should I speak in a metaphor when things like this happen in every-day life. 

“Hey, easy now, you’ve cut your lip,” someone says.  “He’s laughing, it can’t be too bad.”  “It can if it’s my carpet he’s bleeding on.  Hey-up, Big R, on your legs.  We’ll put you to bed.”

**July, 1789**

Joly is sobbing.  We’re in the northern fringes of the city, out by the barrière Blanche.  Why?  I know why _I’m_ here: because I heard Enjolras say “Some of us must go—” and was already standing to volunteer to make up for…well, never mind.  For my sins.  Why is Joly here?  (More importantly, why isn’t Bossuet here?  I don’t mind Joly soaking my waistcoat, not in the least, but I don’t know what to say to him and where is Bossuet and _where is Enjolras?_ ) 

Last night there was a fire out here.  Enjolras says the people are attacking the barriers, the toll barriers that tax the food coming in.  Has a force of the Royal Allemand truly been dispatched?  Why so many foreign troops now?  Doesn’t the French king trust the French people?  Obviously not.  More troops coming here every day.  Maybe _they_ set the fire and blamed the people?  An excuse to grind us all into the dirt.  Such has been the conversation until my head buzzes with it.  Combeferre has heard—but Feuilly was told—and de Courfeyrac read somewhere—that crowd of women on the corner saw it themselves— Bossuet says you can’t go anywhere without tripping over a new rumor.

Bahorel had wanted to come with us but Combeferre clapped him on the shoulder and said, “No, if _you_ go up there you’ll start a revolution.”  That’s when Enjolras said that some of us _must_ go and see.  _There are worse things, Combeferre, than starting a revolution._   But to soften the rebuke, he agreed that Bahorel should stay behind.  “Go and hear what people are saying in the Palais-Royal.  That’s the Forum of our day.  Everyone will be out, if there’s news you’ll hear it there sooner than anywhere.  I doubt we’ll see anything in the Porcherons.”

What _did_ we see ourselves?  Hell if I know.  A crowd.  I wouldn’t call it a mob.  A crowd, out for the evening, heckling some troops or just catching a breath of air.  All right—the truth is, Joly and Bossuet and I had stepped into a little place to have a cool drink.  We heard shots and we heard a window break and half the people in the tavern went to go see what it was all about.  No, all the people—but half of them went to the windows to throw things at the dirty German foreigners while they saw what it was all about and half went to the street to get stuck underfoot while they saw what it was all about.  Joly and I in the latter half.  The force of things carried Bossuet in a different direction.  It was only when we were in the street that some impulse towards heroism took over—took Joly over, that is, not me.  Someone was screaming and he said “I’m a doctor” loud enough for a stout lemonade-seller to pull him through the crowd.  I guess he didn’t hear Joly’s qualifying statements after that.  _Not really a doctor—not yet—going to be one soon—advanced studies—oh God, what happened, was he shot?  Oh God.  Oh God.  A wound to the abdomen, perforation of the intestines—_

The lemonade-seller and another solid man carried the poor bastard into a carriage they’d found, and pressed Joly in with him.  Me with Joly, and then a little girl wailing in German.  She was sticky with lemonade and I can’t forget the smell and now, sitting on the steps of house with Joly weeping on my shoulder—and he sticky with blood—all I can think is that I could drink a fountain of—anything.

—

It seems Bahorel had all the fun after all, if you can call it that—he and Combeferre and little Jean Prouvaire, who is never going to make a priest at this rate, not if he keeps skipping classes to run in the streets with wild troublemakers like that Combeferre devil.  (I jest.)  We’re back in de Courfeyrac’s rooms—the base of operations just now for our embryo political club.  It took hours, every street is filled with people, so many people shouting that you can barely hear the alarm bells ringing throughout the city—and while Bossuet and I set to filling Joly with de Courfeyrac’s brandy, Combeferre tries to tell their news in an orderly fashion. 

He’s trying to set his wig to rights too—and trying to repair his spectacles—and trying not to glow too painfully bright from whatever pure hope is burning in him.  Apparently it was beautiful, whatever it was.  Necker’s out.  Necker’s out, and that’s a bad thing because he was the hope of the Third Estate and the French economy; Necker’s out, and that’s a good thing because the Palais-Royal was filled with a thousand furious men and women.  Everyone running around holding hands, calling everyone-else to arms—to arms!  Bahorel saw that some fellow wanted to make a speech, and boosted him up onto a table.  There were many speeches being made.  Something happened with theaters, and everyone made a general run on green ribbons.  That’s as much as I can make out.  Oh, and the Royal Allemand made itself loved in the Tuileries, too. 

“To arms,” says Enjolras thoughtfully, and he and some of the others exchange looks.  In a book you would say “a look of intelligence passed between them.”  It doesn’t pass to me.  I’ve begun to apply myself to de Courfeyrac’s good, strong brandy.  Joly doesn’t need it as much as I do.  Joly can sleep the sleep of good faith whether he loses his patients or not.  I need something to drown out this incessant ringing of bells.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**II.  
**

**April 1789**

The stranger spits onto the rooftop beside him—spits a clot of blood, but no teeth—and then seems to catch Feuilly’s quizzical gaze.  “Sorry.  This is your roof?  I won’t spit on it again.”  “Eh.  Be my guest.”  Guest: he’s not from this neighborhood, not as far as Feuilly can tell.  Feuilly’s never seen him before this day; and that pistachio-green waistcoat with the lapels nearly out to his (enormous) shoulders?  That’s not a craftsman’s waistcoat.  Had he joined in the looting?

A pause, then the man in the waistcoat slaps his knee suddenly.  “I recognize you!  You stuck your knee in my groin back there in the street when I got tangled up on that wheelbarrow.  —No, no, don’t apologize, wasn’t your fault.  So are you one of that wallpaper-man’s workers?  What’s the story, is he really cutting wages to fifteen sous?  It’s mad.”

“I don’t know.”  Feuilly spares a shrug.  “I’d like to know.  I tried to find out.  But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Enough people in the city don't even have-- _Down, down!”_ The troops down below are firing again, but it turns out this time not into the air.  This time into the thick of the crowd caught in the narrow street.  The stranger curses.  Feuilly feels a strangled cry in his own throat and scrabbles for another loose roof tile.  At this point it’s clearly futile, trying to chase off armed forces, but it might win time for some more men and women to get indoors or to disperse into safer alleyways.  These aren’t even the people who attacked Réveillon’s place, not mostly.  Just the usual crowd come to see what’s going on.

They duck down again when they see guns aimed at the rooftops, at _them,_ and Feuilly feels a heavy hand pull him away from the edge.  “No point in staying here.  Nothing we can do.  We’ll go back down to Grantaire’s room and keep quiet.  You know Grantaire?  Good, then he won’t be too surprised when you pop through his window.”

As it happens, Grantaire isn’t in his room.  They don’t find him until he walks in his front door a few hours later with a tablet full of sketches.  He tosses it towards them; Bahorel flips through it while Grantaire applies himself to a bottle.  Bahorel—they’ve introduced themselves to one another formally now, at the big man’s insistence, shaken hands and everything, swapped names of favorite cafés (again at the big man’s insistence) and discovered a half-dozen possible mutual acquaintances.   He’s not a bad sort, in truth, so far as Feuilly can make out.  Not an opportunist—well, _yes_ , an opportunist, but the opportunist who finds a nearby bully to knock down, not the opportunist who finds a man on the ground to kick a little harder.

Bahorel flips through Grantaire’s work; Feuilly leaves the tablet to him after the first few drawings.  When he makes any effort, Grantaire has a true talent for portraiture.  Faces are wholly recognizable there among the penciled dead.

**May 1789**

This is good.  It’s very good, full of goodness, like its author.  Dear Prouvaire.  The first time Enjolras had seen him in the café he’d almost laughed out loud at the improbability.  Studious Jean Prouvaire.  Devout Jean Prouvaire.  Shy and blushing Jean Prouvaire, _timid_ Jean Prouvaire who has famously only been in trouble with the masters _once_ , for keeping a pot of violets in the dormitory contrary to all regulations—Jean Prouvaire risking his schooling and his masters’ disappointment to run in the streets of Paris?  But he’d spoken up clearly: _Maître Enjolras, Monsieur Combeferre, perhaps you remember me—a few classes younger than you?  I heard that you would be going to Versailles to see the opening of the Estates-General.  My uncle the bishop will be there—a bishop, but a_ good _bishop.  I have a letter—perhaps you could say a pamphlet—well, not quite—_   Here his practiced speech had faltered, but with de Courfeyrac’s hand on his shoulder he’d smiled suddenly, joined them at the table, and gone on.  _If you give it to him, he might read it, and it might help him to influence some of the other clergy.  Here, it’s yours.  Would you—do you think if you worked on it a little, made some of the points stronger?  I can’t go along, of course, but I should be so grateful if you took this with you._

So, yes, it’s good.  Very good.  Calculated to win any heart that feels tenderly the suffering of man and woman and child.  But Enjolras can see why Prouvaire had wanted some points strengthened.  Winning an audience is the first step.  A fine first step.  But most audiences need a little more direction than this for the feelings you’ve raised in them. 

If only the mechanics of this Estates-General had been made more public, they'd know better what to write.  _How_ will the deputies meet?  _How_ will they vote?  If each estate is constrained to vote in a body—the nobles as a single voice, the clergy another, the third estate another—then the third estate’s double representation comes to nothing.  Can they win the entirety of the clergy to their side?  Unlikely.  Hearts that feel suffering tenderly aren’t sufficiently numerous.  But Combeferre had soothed away those doubts this morning for the dozenth time.  _Enjolras, why would they give us double representation if not to give us a greater voice?  The king is a slow man but not a bad man; he listens to Necker now; we all of us desire in good faith to save our country._

Enjolras could use a little of that mild faith now.  He looks up for Combeferre, but finds the slouched frame of Grantaire blocking his view.  Hm.  What can possibly have prompted this surly drunk to join them on this pilgrimage?  Not only to join them but to find transportation for them?  Perhaps it is an artist’s impulse.  The man is covering his sketch paper with bony-knuckled hands, smiling crookedly and—guiltily?  Enjolras smiles a firm smile back.  Perhaps something there exists, something that can grow.  After all, they’ve only just met.  It would be terrible to judge him on three days’ acquaintance.

**June 1789**

“I brought needles and thread.  I think I can splint the broken rib, if I find a good supple stick.  Willow, perhaps, there’s a fine example growing not three streets from here—I pointed it out to you, do you recall?  The _Salix_?  I was telling you that it was an interesting variety.”

“What? —Oh, Bossuet’s umbrella.”

“Yes.  I hate to return it to him broken.  Especially when he didn’t mean to leave it with us.  I can't think how I came to step on it like that.”

“Never fear, brother, I’ll buy him a new one.”

Combeferre sketches a bow towards Enjolras.  He hadn’t been angling for the purchase—had in fact been too absorbed in the properties of umbrella-ribs to think of it—but it doesn’t surprise him.  They share a purse, he and Enjolras, and have since school days.  “Poor Bossuet,” says Combeferre: and “Dear Bossuet,” says Enjolras.

A pause.  “How does the letter to de Courfeyrac go?  I want to add three or four lines when you finish.”

“Mm.  I’ll need another page at least.  I’m only now coming to what Mirabeau said.  _Let the king cut our throats, tell him we are all awaiting our deaths, but he cannot hope to separate us until we have made a constitution._ That was it, yes?”

Combeferre smiles fondly.  “I’m not sure he envisioned Louis cutting our throats himself, in person.  But yes.  That was it.”

“I’m sorry.  I know you like Louis.”

“The man.  If that were enough—” 

“—we wouldn’t be here.”

**July 1789**

Damned if I know what day it is now. I woke up with something poking me in the knee, and de Courfeyrac apologizing for the disturbance. It was his bed I was in. But he _would_ apologize. I must have been goggling at him because he said “Oh—well, this, yes, it’s a pike—I happen to have a few sitting around, the way one does. —Listen, Grantaire, my dear chap, you’d better stay here today. Probably safer than trying to get back to Bahorel’s place. Shall I draw the blinds for you?”

So I suppose that was some hours ago, and that I slept a bit after that. Bells are still ringing and people are still shouting in the street but I think what woke me up was remembering that de Courfeyrac’s hair wasn’t powdered. Not only did he have a pike—why? how?—but his hair wasn’t powdered. And he had no cravat. De Courfeyrac without his cravat! And no woman to blame! 

Outside, and the sun is very bright, or maybe that’s just hangover. As I move in the direction that seems right I begin to see familiar faces. Feuilly, sitting very still next to a black shape. My heart stops when I see a tuft of golden hair but then I recognize Jean Prouvaire’s stockings. Funny, the things you never knew you knew, but he always wears striped stockings and Enjolras never does. 

Feuilly stands up. He’s got blood on his shirt and trousers, even on his cap, but he seems unhurt. After a little while he tells me to go home and I shake my head. There’s nothing to do for Prouvaire now so we keep going until we find some of the others, closer to the Bastille walls. These walls, they are very high and very thick, and I scrub sleepily at my eyes while I study them. Combeferre is studying them as well, with rather more intelligence. Probably he has an equation in his head: what force to conquer so many feet of stone. Multiply by—what, the discrepancy between daily wages and the price of bread? Divide by the weight of centuries of servility? Carry the social contract and add the deficit? Subtract the fluttering pulse of Jean Prouvaire? No, that’s backwards. Or not, I never could master this kind of science. 

I half hear the conversation beside me. “People are negotiating in there?” “Maybe.” “Where is Jean—” “I’m sorry. I didn’t even see it. We were in the front. He was speaking of the future one moment, and the crowd was pressing forward. Then when the garrison fired…I carried him back from the crowd but he was already...”

I suppose I said something, probably profane, because Enjolras looks at me with a frown. But then we hear more guns from inside the Bastille courtyard and the crowd surges again. I catch his hand and I think—I think—I think he presses my fingers before we fall apart.

 


End file.
